Living In The Ashes of 9/11

The terrorists won the war because they goaded us into destroying ourselves.

If they only knew from whom it was under siege.

For at least a decade after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the vast majority of Americans treated the arrival of the date on their calendars as an opportunity for remembrance. Where we were, what we did, who we called, how we felt, and most significantly, who we lost. It was, for a short time afterwards, considered a unifying event for the people of this nation, but by the time we reached the first anniversary, it was quite clear that unity was a mirage. The divisions that had been building—accelerated by the rapidity of technological development—burst out from the veneer holding them in and made it clear to anyone who was paying close attention that bipartisanship was a dead duck. The midterm campaign ads that fall were some of the most grotesque displays of calumnies known to political history.

Despite that black mark, for the first fifteen years afterwards, it was the one day where regardless of your political affiliations, you shut up about politics and recognized that the day was bigger than any one of us. Like many things, though, Donald Trump broke that unwritten rule in 2016 and it hasn’t been the same since.

Collectively, we have been wrong about its impact on our national story. What we should’ve understood, for a very long time now, is that it is the red line of our history. There’s a before and after to 9/11 that little else in our existence can match. Even the Civil War took a full century to ultimately shake out, as the descendants of freed slaves were still lacking their full, equal freedom. But with 9/11, the switch from what America was to what is is now was fast.

We will find these people and they will suffer the consequences of taking on this nation.

—Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary, on 9/11

We are a country that believes first and foremost in justice, and that’s what distinguishes us from those people who carried out these acts.

—Leon Panetta, former White House chief of staff, on 9/11

Within a couple of weeks, the Patriot Act was passed with nearly zero dissent, a harbinger of much darker legislation to come. The Department of Justice began targeting men of Arab descent, regardless of citizenship status, regardless of their religion. The Pentagon opened up detention camps in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which have never closed, and where the CIA began bending the law in torture sessions with those we captured. Black sites were opened in other nations for the same purpose, so the law could be broken there outright by government officials in interrogations. FBI agents began seizing library records in actions that recalled the Red Scare of the 1950s. A program called TIA (Total Information Awareness) was floated by the Pentagon but the public outcry was so great that it was binned…or so they said.

We were told over and over again that the government would hunt down the terrorists responsible, and that any curbing of our rights that they did was a necessary sacrifice for our safety. The Bush administration proclaimed they were protecting our freedom. A mere eighteen months almost to the day, we were invading Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or its attacks upon us, an invasion that to this day hangs heavily over our nation. Not only was it morally abominable, it was pragmatically wrong, further botched by the incompetence and hubris of the Bush administration.

"Your security is not in the hands of [Democratic candidate John] Kerry or [President George] Bush or al-Qaida. Your security is in your own hands …"

"We had no difficulty in dealing with Bush and his administration because they resemble the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half by the sons of kings ... they have a lot of pride, arrogance, greed and thievery …

"[Bush] adopted despotism and the crushing of freedoms from Arab rulers – called it the Patriot Act under the guise of combating terrorism ..."

—Osama bin Laden, October 7, 2004

One policy change that was largely overlooked at the time it occurred was that by 2007, to ensure we could continue feeding the meat grinder of our endless war, the Defense Department relaxed its restrictions on recruits or volunteers with racist or white supremacist backgrounds. There was great concern at that time expressed by former officers and civilian Pentagon officials that this would slowly eat away at military discipline while allowing dangers to our internal security to gain vital training from those it would seek to harm. We’ll come back to this later.

As these threats grew in the background, our technology accelerated. Broadband Internet spread across the country and social media began cropping up, replacing chat rooms as the arenas in which we discussed and debated current events. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr—name a niche and there was an social media site for that. Text messaging went from a niche segment of cellular phones in 2001 to the main use of those phones within just a few years. We soon had “smart” phones, too, cellphones that allowed us to stay connected to the Internet no matter where we traveled. As our lives intertwined with all of these, the intrusions into what we considered our privacy exploded as well. The government was, with the connivance of the cellular and Internet providers, scraping our data, illegally tapping calls, reading text messages, and winnowing their way silently into our lives. It was a major issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, until the economic collapse in September of that year forestalled any further debate on it.

2011 was the end of the 9/11 era and the beginning of the Immediacy era. Instant dissemination of our thoughts to the world via Twitter. Instant viewing of video content and television networks via smartphones. Instant uploading of events as they happened. There were no gatekeepers, no filters, no pause to consider whether it would be wise or right to perform an action.

And so we come to 2011, the critical juncture that set us down the path to today. Ten years after the attack on our country, the end of the 9/11 era ran headlong into the birth of a new, chaotic, decentralized kaleidoscope of dangers.

That year began with a lengthy government shutdown and a protracted fight over the budget between President Barack Obama and the Republican-controlled House. That control came on the backs of the “Tea Party” Republicans, who the establishment leaders of the party brought into higher positions of power, believing that they could control their radical beliefs. The austerity measures of the 2011 budget, while our economy was still fragile, hurt many people (myself included!) and hindered our recovery. That battle and the lack of punishment for the banking class fueled the Occupy Wall Street movement, which occupied Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and were driven out of their encampment by NYPD violence after 57 days. Many of those people who participated would be lured in by conspiracies and angry Internet personalities going forward, a postdated check that would be cashed in during the 2016 election.

America finally located and executed Osama bin Laden in a military raid, putting a stamp of finality on the 9/11 era a mere twenty-four hours after the now-infamous White House Correspondents Dinner where Barack Obama and Seth Meyers publicly humiliated Donald Trump. This occasion was the impetus for Trump’s decision to run for president in 2016. Concurrently, the social media network Twitter became a medium for Arab citizens to organize, mobilize, and overthrow multiple dictators in the region during the “Arab Spring,” most notably Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. The immediacy of Twitter, a fairly recent innovation by the fledgling company, was noted and remembered for future use by dictator-in-the-wings Vladimir Putin of Russia.

The big wind-down of our Iraq invasion was at the end of 2011, and with it, we had thousands of disaffected veterans, many of whom were the less-than-stellar recruits of the later Bush years, returning to a society riven by expanding racial backlash against our first, and only, black president. These veterans were lacking the mental health care they needed, and turned to a greatly-changed Internet, where conspiracies freely flowed alongside fact, and an unhinged lunatic in Texas named Alex Jones was becoming the most viewed person on YouTube. Many of Jones’s fans were running for political office, and winning, which provided the veneer of official acceptance to many of his rantings.

As anyone who has watched the documentary Against All Enemies can attest, there were many disaffected Iraq and Afghan War veterans that were part of January 6th (including some active duty military!), or joined militias, believing sincerely that they are protecting the nation from “the danger within.” Many of these people would not have been in the military, received the training that makes them more lethal, and had the deference given to them by people who don’t know anything beyond “they’re a veteran” if this policy had not been implemented. All of the warnings were there, and they went unheeded because we did not teach history properly in American schools, and so we did not recognize what we needed to.

We did not recognize that these sorts of people helped form the Nazi coalition in 1931 and 1932. We did not think it could happen here, because we didn’t teach just how close it actually came to happening here in the 1930s, where the KKK and German immigrants joined forces to form fascist paramilitaries. Many of these fascists were able to join the National Guard in various states and learn about weapons storage depots, naval ship security procedures, and war plans for an invasion. Officers in both police forces and military branches actively sided with the fascists, helped them steal weapons or evade arrest. 20,000 people filled Madison Square Garden for an American Nazi rally. It was no blip, it was an active danger to the country, and after World War II we swept it completely under the rug. We even invited former Nazis into America because we wanted their skill sets for weapons and rockets. We didn’t teach these things, and so we were woefully underprepared for how allowing racists and fascists to join the military and fight in a war of choice against Middle Eastern peoples could, and would, spectacularly backfire on us.

These disaffected veterans are now a massive danger to American freedom, providing a fifth column of terror that can be unleashed upon the rest of us when Trump decides to consolidate his power once and for all.

Along with the above-mentioned veterans, there were disaffected workers who were left behind by the botched post-recession response and subsequent enforced austerity of the 2011-2013 budgets, joined by millions of Americans who were resentful of a Black president and then further infuriated by the Black Lives Matter movements that sprang up in 2014. These people combined together in a toxic soup that jointly decided that there was nothing that would deter them from electing Donald Trump president in 2016.

The first Trump Administration would not have been possible without 9/11. It would not have been possible without the Iraq War. It would not have been possible without massive racial backlash. He was the beneficiary of bipartisan foolishness in supporting the invasion of Iraq, and further benefited from President Obama’s commitment to bipartisanship despite a massive landslide and Republican failure in the face of every challenge it faced. It was that commitment to bipartisanship that kept Obama from going after the bankers that caused the 2008 financial crash, and his failure to do so was yet another foundational stone that enabled Trump. The crash had united Left and Right against Wall Street, and Obama whiffed on the hanging pitch over the plate.

Despite the millions protesting this very obvious fascism, the problem we face is that millions more are not rising up. Ian Kershaw, the historian who authored the definitive biography of Adolf Hitler, wrote this about Stalinism in To Hell and Back: Europe 1911-1949:

Half a million party members were recruited between 1934 and 1939. Most were poorly educated and inexperienced. These newcomers now moved in great numbers into the lower ranks of administrative authority -and they liked the taste of power, as well as the status and privileges it brought them. Supervisors, foremen and managers were needed in the factories, not just workers (Nearly 30 million peasants poured into towns from the countryside during the 1930s, attracted by the chance of increased income but unaware of their forthcoming subservience to brutal authority.) The often unbridled ambitions of low-ranking administrators could be served if they in turn served the regime. Ruthlessness for the cause merely mirrored what was happening above them. Despotic managers could, and often did, treat their charges like dirt, knowing that this would bring no sanction, indeed would be welcomed, as long as targets were met. And careers depended on those targets being met. Failure, however arbitrarily it was defined, was too grim to contemplate. It was the core of a system reliant upon millions of 'little Stalins' who made the regime work at the grass roots.

Those boldface parts are the crucial ones we need to keep in mind. There is material gain for those who support the fascism wholeheartedly. There are plenty who will gladly work at “Crocodile Concentration Camp” or whatever the Fascist Doughboy™ calls it, accepting income that they could never earn without an education anywhere else. There are plenty who will join ICE because they get to pair their unbridled ambitions with the ability to be as cruel as they want without any consequences at all. There will be no punishment by this regime for cruelty, because cruelty is their raison d’etre. America has openly become as violent, as uncaring, as cruel and arbitrary as the regimes we criticized and the terrorists we hunted.

”No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.” Edward R. Murrow, quoted by Dan Rather within a half hour of the collapse of the North Tower on September 11, 2001.

Donald Trump holds office today because tens of millions of people willingly chose to be his accomplices. He is terrorizing this nation through the use of secret police forces, using unmarked vehicles and ski masks, jumping out and arresting people in broad daylight. He has deployed the military twice for law enforcement purposes without cause, first in Los Angeles and now in Washington, D.C. He is openly speaking of suspending elections and defying court orders. He has antagonized our allies, supported our enemies, and made over $3.4 billion for his family in illegal schemes with both foreign and domestic businesses. He is, in short, wrecking this nation from the inside.

It surpasses all of the wildest dreams of people like Osama bin Laden, who said over 20 years ago that we had adopted the policies and behaviors of the despots of the Arab world. Today our President is accepting lavish bribes from those very despots, from the investments with his son-in-law by Saudi Arabia to the billion-dollar luxury aircraft from Qatar, and ruling with an iron fist, secret police, and a rule of law increasingly tied to his paranoid, delusional whims. He is supported in this by his sycophantic, intellectually mediocre and morally bankrupt staffers like Stephen Miller, Karoline Leavitt, and the cabinet secretaries who also embody all of those traits, especially Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem. We are everything bin Laden accused us of now. We gave up our freedoms. We subverted our democracy. We’re locking ourselves inside our borders, destined to become North Korea with a nicer landscape.

We lost the war on terror because we lost our souls, our laws, and our principles. It wasn’t inevitable. Clearly, though, bin Laden and others like him understood our nature as Americans better than we understood it. They surmised, quite correctly, that we’d make all of the wrong choices because we had not the wit to see the world from someone else’s view and we were far too arrogant for our own good.

So now we have a new terrorist threat. The call is coming from inside the house. There are no invaders. State-sponsored terrorism is terrorism of our government against the people, and only the people, united, can stop it from continuing.